Music Industry Careers: Kaleah Wooten on Being a Works Registration Analyst at BMI

BMI is one of three primary performing rights organizations (PROs) in the United States, along with ASCAP and SESAC. Songwriters and publishers register their works with these organizations to receive performance royalties. In April, Kaleah Wooten and I met for coffee to discuss her job as a works registration analyst at BMI.

Wooten attended Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), a school located 45 minutes southeast of Nashville that has one of the best music business programs in the United States. “I started in their music industry program, which is basically, like, for the music performance side of things, and then I had a minor in music business. COVID hit, and then I changed my major… I became a music business major… around my junior year, and then that's when I started doing the songwriting stuff, taking music business classes.”

After graduating in 2022, Wooten applied for a position as a music analyst at BMI, not entirely sure what the position would consist of. Following a relatively impromptu interview, she was hired that December by a fellow MTSU alum.

“The actual title is Works Registration Analyst,” Wooten explains. “[The works registration team registers] all the songs that are submitted to BMI by BMI affiliates [like] writers [and] publishers, [via] online submissions… Somebody can submit a song, it's going to go through us, through our registration team… [BMI has] a New York office, London office, L.A., Atlanta just opened, Miami is a thing, but [my team is] the only registration team among all the offices… [It] means all the registrations that come to BMI… come to Nashville… It's like 15 or 20 of us… We register [works] or process them, as we call it, onto our system… We are one of the most, I would say, important teams in the whole company because if the songs aren't registered…?” Wooten trails off. PROs can’t pay royalties for songs to their writers and publishers until those songs are registered with them. 

Wooten’s specific role involves updating registrations and processing the higher earning registrations. She does this alongside a couple other similarly tasked works registration analysts.

Kaleah Wooten, photo by Grace Hollowell

Wooten describes a typical week as working from home Mondays and Fridays and coming into the office for the other three days of the work week. The schedule is flexible despite her somewhat long commute from a town outside of Nashville. The days working from home are typically the longest. She laughs, “I’m so busy, but like, isn’t this the life I prayed for?” She’s been surrounded by music her whole life (her father is Grammy-nominated producer Kelvin Wooten), and working at BMI allows her to work in the music industry as both an analyst (full-time) and a creative (part-time).

Wooten tells me, however, that publishing is largely a mystery to many songwriters. She describes the process as something you’d typically need a college-level education to understand. She admits that she’s still learning. While there are songwriters and publishers who know how to properly register a song, there are still many who don’t understand the process. For starters, you can join BMI at this link and register your songs using the “Register New Works” tab.

Most people on the works registration team at BMI are songwriters. In fact, Wooten’s manager made a playlist, linked here, of the songs of everyone on the team. Wooten speaks highly of the Nashville music scene, making a point to note that not everyone in it is in country music. There are big R&B and jazz scenes too. 

Learn more about working at BMI on their website.